Bloomberg Open Sources Its Market Data Distribution Technology 25
First time accepted submitter Cara_Latham writes "Hoping to spur innovation and collaboration, Bloomberg LP is opening its market data interfaces to anyone, without cost or restriction. The market data provider's application programming interface (API), known as BLPAPI (Bloomberg LP API), is already used by Bloomberg, its clients and other technology providers to build connections between financial firms' applications and Bloomberg's market data and applications. Today any technology professional, or even students at a university, can access BLPAPI to quickly build connections to market data feeds. The BLPAPI interface works with a number of programming languages and operating systems, including Java, C, C++, .NET, COM and Perl."
Re:Philanthropy (Score:5, Informative)
The *API* is free, not the data feeds, which means you can create third-party applications without a terminal, but will need one (or one of their appliances) to test it and use their data. So, unless you are willing to open your wallet and grab a few thousand a month, it's probably not that useful for someone that doesn't have a contract with them.
Re:Philanthropy (Score:4, Informative)
I've actually contacted Bloomberg to ask about this, and they're not even open-sourcing anything. They're announcing their intention to form a committee to create open standards based on their tech. This is great because it will help fill gaps that AMQP and others are trying to fill, but I'm not sure it deserves an announcement until, you know, there's actually something to look at.
Re:Philanthropy (Score:4, Informative)
It is not that useful PERIOD...
The Bloomberg API is not that great. It is like writing code to match a DDE interface. I have written code against the Bloomberg API and while it sounds nice that Bloomberg is open sourcing it, it is useless.
I can understand why Bloomberg created the API that they did. The problem has to do with being flexible and not knowing what the underlying data is. Remember Bloomberg grabs data about equities, bonds, commodities, etc. And they all have their data idiosyncracises.
I think the real problem with Bloomberg is that they are being shutout of the market. I last used them a year ago and frankly they were not much better than twitter. The advantage with Twitter is that it is free, whereas Bloomberg costs about 1900 USD per month. The only place where Bloomberg still has an advantage is its data warehouse. I have yet to find a data warehouse that is as extensive as theirs...